Джо Горес - Dead Man

“Yeah. Gotcha.”

“Apartment three-C. We’re looking for a call from a James Zimmer or anybody who could be Zimmer. I figure a week tops.”

Moe shuffled the bills together like a hand of cards.

“I can use an infinity mike at the brokerage house, can go back in for it afterwards. At the apartment I might have to go into the walls, that’d mean I’d have to leave the equipment.”

Dain gestured at the third fan of bills he had laid on the counter. “If you can salvage the equipment, consider the extra five bills a bonus.”

“A week gonna be enough?”

“If we’ve got no action in seven days, I’ll have to rethink my premise.”

Moe started to pocket the folded bills, then hesitated.

“Randy says you’re working for Teddy Maxton on this one.”

“Randy’s got a big mouth,” said Dain coldly.

“We went through the academy together, what can I say?”

“What the fuck is it with Teddy Maxton and the SFPD? Mention his name and you all piss your pants in unison. Maxton’s in Chicago, for Chrissake.”

“He’s got a long arm.”

“That bother you, Moe?”

“It rains, my leg hurts, that bothers me. I can’t get it up for the wife, that bothers me. Maxton don’t bother me.”

“Then why are we talking about him?”

Moe leaned forward slightly across the counter to look closer at Dain, as if confirming some rumor he’d heard.

“Watch your butt with this guy, Dain. He’s one tricky son of a bitch.”

Dain smiled for the first time since his wife and child had come up in the conversation.

“So am I, Moe. So am I.”

Maxton got out of the elevator on the P-1 level under his office building and crossed the concrete to the Mercedes parked in his slot. It was another scorching Chicago summer afternoon, but Maxton, moving between his air-conditioned office and his air-conditioned home in his air-conditioned car, only felt the heat by his backyard pool, where he expected it.

He pushed the remote that unlocked the doors of the Mercedes, started to get in, checked the movement. Dain was sitting in the rider’s side. Mozart’s Sinfonia Concertante, K-64, was sweet as honey off the car’s CD player.

“How the fuck did you get in here?”

Instead of answering, Dain said, “We’re going out to O’Hare, I want to show you something.”

“That’ll take hours this time of day, and I’ve got two tickets to the Cubs game.”

Dain said nothing. Maxton got in, grumbling, began fighting the rush-hour traffic out Wacker to the big convoluted freeway exchange that would put him on the John Kennedy north to O’Hare. Cars were stacked bumper-to-bumper, horns blared, exhausts fumed, light glared into drivers’ eyes off polished chrome. The air conditioner whooshed softly under the Mozart.

“Zimmer and a peroxide blonde were booked on a flight leaving for Rio four hours after the bonds were taken,” said Dain in a conversational voice.

This jerked Maxton’s head around. “They left the country? How the fuck’re you going to—”

“Remember last New Year’s Eve office party? When you hired some exotic dancers to put on a show for the employees?”

“Of course. We’d had a good year, financially.”

“Zimmer met her there.”

“Who, goddam you?”

“The woman who planned this whole thing. You had a little something going with her yourself at the time, I hear.”

Maxton said icily, “You hear wrong.”

“She wasn’t always a peroxide blonde. Think about it.”

Dain slid down in the seat and shut his eyes. He didn’t open them until the roar of a landing jetliner’s engines penetrated even the Mercedes’s vaunted sound-exclusion paneling, then he sat up suddenly.

“Get in the right lane, to long-term parking.”

Maxton swung the wheel over, stopped at the striped arm, got his ticket from the machine, drove through. His voice was tentative, almost shocked. “You’re saying it was... Vangie?”

“Evangeline Broussard,” Dain nodded. “She planned the steal, she was waiting for Zimmer in an alley around the corner from the bank. Go down this row.”

Maxton obediently drove down the long row of dusty cars.

“I don’t get it, Dain. Why would Vangie—”

“You wanted her to fuck one of your business associates in the back room during the Christmas party, for Chris-sake.”

His bewilderment didn’t lessen. “Yeah? So?”

“She thought she loved you, Maxton,” Dain said in an almost defeated voice. “She thought you loved her.”

“Loved her? She’s a fucking hootch dancer, for Chris-sake!”

“Stop here.”

Dain walked over to Vangie’s red Porsche; from the dust on it, and the dried rain-streaks on the windshield, it obviously had not been moved in many days. Maxton followed, still not knowing what they were doing there. On the far side of the Porsche, Dain leaned his elbows on the dusty top. Maxton faced him across the grimy red roof.

“And then?”

Maxton shrugged sullenly. “She did it, of course. A couple weeks later her gig ended, so we broke it off. But I gave her the money for a car since she was driving to New York...”

Dain patted his palms on the roof of the Porsche.

“This car. Right here. Vangie didn’t expect anyone to connect her with Zimmer, probably figured the car would get stolen and that would be that.”

Maxton started pounding his clenched fists on the car roof.

“Goddam her soul to hell! My money, my car! I’ll see her dead, the rotten little bitch!”

Dain shrugged by raising one shoulder.

“That crap doesn’t do any good, Maxton. Zimmer saw her at the party, fell hard. She saw him as a way to get back at you. She must have laughed herself sick when you decided to steal two million in bonds and handed them to Zimmer for safekeeping.”

“And the fuckers are away clean! You may as well—”

“You ever consider what sort of trouble you’d have converting two million in American bearer bonds into cruzeiros in Brazil? When the rate is nearly four thousand to one and you don’t even have the language? You can bet Vangie considered it.”

“What... are you saying?”

“They never caught the plane. Doubled back to the city by airport limo, caught a bus to Texarkana, left it at some stop in between. Once they have you thinking South America, why leave the country? The bonds are legal tender in any brokerage house they walk into.”

“How do you know all this stuff?” asked Maxton almost suspiciously.

“It’s what I’m good at, remember?” He walked around the car back toward the Mercedes, Maxton following.

“I’ll get a list of the bonds to every brokerage—”

“No. You’ll spook them. She’s smart, I tell you.” He stopped, opened the driver’s door of the Mercedes. “She’ll plan to wait a few months before cashing them in—”

“My bitch wife won’t wait a few months, damn you! I’ll put an army to work on the brokerage houses, we’ll—”

“No army. Nobody. Nada. Zero. Nothing. Get it?”

Dain held the open door; after a moment’s hesitation, Maxton slid in under the wheel.

“All right,” he said, “I’ll play it your way for the moment. What’s your next move?”

“Go back to San Francisco.”

“San Francisco?”

“To wait. It won’t be long, believe me. She won’t be able to control him.”

“Wait is the goddamnedest stupidest idea I’ve ever—”

“It’s time to quit looking for your prey and start looking for what your prey is looking for. In the dry season if you’re a lion and your prey is a wildebeest, you wait by the water hole. If you’re a red-tailed hawk and your prey is a field mouse, you soar over the—”